Seeds of Destiny

by Thomas A Easton

  Marcus Aurelius Hrecker unfastened the elastic cord that held his makeshift ceiling of wall material in place. It did not cover the entire cubicle, but it did serve to block vision and provide an illusion of privacy. Tamiko let go of the travel grid and slipped through the opening. A moment later, he had joined her.

  She touched the plastic overhead. “You’re supposed to leave more space around the edges. You shouldn’t have to unfasten it to get in.”

  “You’ve said that before.” He kicked a robot aside as he drew her toward the sleepsac on the floor. “The last time you were here.”

  Their words were not loud, not much above a whisper. People in nearby cubicles were just as careful not to stand out above the background murmur of soft talk, shifting bodies, and quiet music, though a laugh echoed from further down the tunnel. Some evenings there were fights. Sometimes there were parties, though with those the neighbors joined in rather than protest. Sometimes they even took down their walls to make a larger space.

  For a moment they said nothing more at all. But then he drew back from her just enough to see her face in the light that filtered through the plastic. “Lots of people do it,” he said.

  “Security doesn’t like it. They think people don’t want them watching.”

  “They don’t. We don’t. You don’t. Do you?”

  She giggled. He murmured. She giggled again.

  Later, he said, “You’re going, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am. I work for the General, after all.” There was a pause. “And I want to go. Here, the only place you can live outdoors is Earth. Everywhere else…” She pointed at the poster he had taped to one flimsy wall. It seemed an abstract landscape until one recognized the many-sulfured hues of Io. “The Moon, Mars, the habitats. Here. You have to stay in a box. I want to see another living world. And the aliens sound fascinating.”

  “Even if you have to destroy them?”

  “If we have to.” He hoped the reluctance in her voice was genuine. “If they aren’t natural. If the Gypsies made them. If they’re monsters. Your work will help.”

  Hrecker grunted. The Engineers had defeated the Orbitals a century before largely because they alone had seen that the torrent of energy the probability shifters coaxed from the vacuum could become a particle beam weapon. And among his other tasks at Belt Center 83, he had worked on improving particle flux, beam collimation, and range.

  “You’re going back to Mars.” It was not a question.

  “Back to the university. Back to the routine. It’s probably just as well.”

  “What about us?”

  Her mass was not enough to keep him from shrugging. “I’m not a gypsymp. But…” He pointed at the flimsy ceiling, and she nodded. He could not, should not, say any more. There was no telling who was listening.

  But they both knew what he wished he could say aloud: He was no Gypsy sympathizer, but he was not nearly as convinced as she that it was right to purge every trace of gengineering from the universe.

  “We won the war a long time ago,” he said instead. He meant that the old conflict between mechanical and biological technology was over. “In fact, they couldn’t have fled without adopting our kind of technology. Spaceships and Q-drives.”

  “Potsters,” she whispered in his ear. And yes, he thought, the Engineers had had to accept some biological technology in turn. Here they ate processed algae, but on Mars and elsewhere, much of the food came from gengineered plants.

  “They’re good,” she added. “But I wouldn’t eat them if I had any choice. Lobsters and potatoes are just as good and more moral. Purer, you know?”

  “Natural.” That was the party line. Did she really believe it?

  She nodded against his shoulder. “That’s it. We should get rid of them. Udder trees, too. And oil trees, hanky bushes, snackbushes…” She continued the list.

  “People like them too much. They’re too tasty, or too useful.”

  “Tough.”

  “Why can’t we combine the two?” he asked quietly. “The way we’re already doing, really. The best of both?”

  She shook her head. “We’re too different.”

  The lights above the travel grid never dimmed, and the thin plastic of the cubicle’s walls and partial ceiling did nothing to exclude the brightness. But people had long since learned to sleep without dark. Tamiko was snoring gently, prettily, seconds after closing her eyes.

  He remained awake, thinking: He had never accepted the ideology of his world as unquestioningly as she. As unquestioningly as almost everyone, when no one alive today had ever seen a Gypsy.

  When he had first heard of the Explorer’s discovery, he had said he hoped the government had argued over what to do. That was not a thought suitable for someone who thought the Gypsies and all their works were automatically, innately evil.

  Somewhere along the line, sometime in his life, even before he met Tamiko, he had become a moderate.

  Yet he kept silent about it. Or nearly so, though he thought Tamiko might think he was only playing devil’s advocate when he opposed her.

  He sighed. If he opposed her less gently, if he said what he really thought, he would surely lose her. He might also lose his job, his liberty, even his life.

  Meanwhile, he continued to work on the probability shifters that would permit the ships of the Engineers’ expeditionary force to stutter their ways through space. The problem remained that the fields generated by the probability shifter, the regions of warped probability that alone made macroscopic quantum tunneling possible, were still too small. They were more than large enough for the Explorer, but the new ships were larger still.

  He did not doubt that they would lick the problem, just as other teams would eventually reduce the time needed for a single leap to a single nanosecond.

  It was only a matter of time.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dotson Barbtail let the crowd sweep him through the high doors into the Great Hall of Worldtree Center. The female beside him was nearly as tall as he, and everything around them glowed with all the warmth a springtime sun could carry. Even the armor and weaponry and ancient gadgetry displayed along the walls gleamed as if freshly polished, despite the film of dust and the occasional cobweb the light revealed.

  “There’s a new shop out by the Field,” she was saying in his ear. “Basket lunches. Beer. The berries are ripe. And it’s a beautiful day.”

  “Ah, Sunglow.” He struggled to keep his voice a relaxed snarl, not the high melody of tension and anger he suddenly felt. He patted the soft, golden fur of her hip. “You know I have work to do at home.”

  Her grip on his elbow tightened, and her voice smoothed with irritation. “You always do.”

  The female to their left was staring at them, nudging her mate with an elbow, saying, “Look at them! What’s he thinking of? She’s one of them!”

  Others heard and joined her glare. The tip of a lashing tail brushed Dotson’s ankles. He knew it could not be Sunglow’s, for “one of them” meant one of the tailless Racs.

  “She shouldn’t even be here!”

  As Sunglow seemed to shrink beside him, he pressed against the flow, steering her with his hand on her hip, his wrist against her lower back, just above the swell of her buttocks. He could feel the bony nub beneath her skin, all she had to mark her biological origins and her kinship to him and all the rest, twitching against his wrist. From the corner of his eye, he noted the rotundity of her belly and its statement of maturity and health. He wished his own swelled out as much, but he did not eat the way he should.

  The crowd was so far thickest toward the front of the Hall. To the right, toward the rear, there was still room, and that was where he directed their steps. He felt relief when the righteous comments faded behind and the looks they drew began to seem more sympathetic. Here were a very few other tailless Racs, a mixed couple or two, a child whose short tail proclaimed its hybrid status.

  “Remember,” he said. “You’re an exchange student
from Farshore. Not a beast from the forest, not a degenerate from the slums. Not whatever they say. Don’t let them get to you.”

  “It’s hard,” she said, and her voice was still high, higher, pained and suffering and more than a little mad.

  “I know.” As they passed the glass display case, his mind froze for a moment. How long had it been since he raided it for that seed? Months, though “month” was a meaningless term on a world without a moon. The word had come from the Remakers and meant a span of thirty days. He raised himself on his toes. The key was just where he had left it. No one had yet discovered the theft.

  He remembered how empty the vast room had been that night, how quiet, how clean. Now it roared with Racs talking, talking, talking. It smelled too, of fur both washed and unwashed, of soaps and perfumes, of morning meals. Even in the rear of the Hall, it was now impossible to move.

  “There aren’t many tailless Racs here,” she said.

  “They’re almost all servants and laborers. Poor. Low-class. Unambitious.”

  “We’re poor at home too. But not unambitious.”

  “You made it here.”

  “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t. You’re just about my only friend.”

  He winced and looked away from her. He liked her, he did. He wished he dared to like her better. But… He changed the subject. “The place is packed.” He could feel warm flesh and fur against his back, his sides, his front. A cry of outrage elsewhere in the Hall prompted him to clutch at that harness pouch that held his money. Someone had joined those Racs who had lost everything they carried while they— but somehow not their thieves— were immobilized in the weekly crowd.

  “It always is,” she said. “Every time. And most of them don’t see me when they look at me.”

  The room was filled with those who worked at Worldtree Center, students, teachers, scholars, librarians, administrators, and filled again with those who worked elsewhere in the valley or in the city atop the surrounding bluffs. There were also those who came great distances to worship at the center of the Rac civilization, in the valley where once the Remakers had created their kind. There were also pouchpickers and strapnips. And almost every one had a tail.

  “I’m surprised you come.”

  “Just with you,” she said. She patted his arm. “I could help, you know. Then you’d be done sooner. We could…”

  “Uh-uh.” He shook his head abruptly, and as abruptly wished he hadn’t.

  “You always say that.”

  Few were paying much attention to the mural that recounted the history of the Racs, or to exhibits such as the glass case and its casket of seeds. All eyes were focused on the front of the Hall, the miniature Worldtree that reached almost all the way to the Hall’s high roof, the pyramid of steps at its base, the High Priest emerging from a small doorway on the right.

  The roar of the crowd died to the merest murmur as the High Priest mounted the steps and revealed the purpose of the pyramid, to lift him high enough to be visible throughout the Hall. He wore a light yellow cap and cape marked to recall the black ears and back-stripe of the Founder.

  The High Priest faced the Worldtree’s icon, head up, arms held high. He held the pose as he turned toward his audience, scratched the side of his muzzle with sweeping gestures that could be seen throughout the Hall, and bowed. “Welcome,” he rumbled.

  As one, the crowd scratched the flanks of its myriad snouts and rumbled back, a sound of immense satisfaction at being where they were.

  It was this way at the end of every week. The people of First-Stop filed into the Hall and stood shoulder to shoulder, packed tighter than ever they were outside this shrine to the high Worldtree at the center of their world, to the aliens who had Remade them from the beasts. Yet they did not feel awe. Their religion was one of pride and determination and striving.

  The High Priest’s voice snarled and rumbled forth. “Our gods are gone,” he cried. “But they have not abandoned us. Before they left, they said, ‘Come to us when you are ready.’”

  The murmur of the crowd that filled the Great Hall swelled in response. Scent glands released involuntary bursts of odor, nostrils widened, bodies shifted.

  “Are we ready?” His pause was hardly long enough for any answer. “No.”

  The crowd’s murmur shifted higher in pitch, expressing an anxiety as ritual as the disappointed High Priest’s sway of body and shake of head.

  “We have not learned enough. Yes!” he cried. “We have learned an enormous amount. We climbed the Worldtree.” He gestured toward Kitewing’s portion of the Hall’s mural. No one looked.

  “We learned how much, much longer our Remakers took to learn as much. Then we learned to build thundertrees and grasp the edge of space with our own claws.”

  The murmur grew deeper, the crowd of Racs more pleased with itself. Dotson twisted to see where the thundertrees were being added to the mural. The painters had begun their work only a month before.

  “That too is not enough. Our Remakers are gone far beyond the edge of space. We have much to learn, even with the aid they left us. But we will never give up. To do so would be to deny our destiny.

  “We will continue. And someday we will deserve to call our Remakers what they called themselves: Gypsies.”

  The rhetoric continued until it was time to celebrate the progress that had been made in recent days. A large door to the left of the High Priest’s pyramid swung open, and three young Racs wheeled in a mass of complicated looking machinery. It proved to be the latest version of the mechanical arm that would aid the building of the space station Rac engineers planned to place in orbit above their world. The High Priest’s pride was clear when he gestured, the Hall darkened, and one wall was illuminated with a scene from space: Three construction capsules equipped with smaller arms were beginning to assemble a framework of aluminum girders. Behind them First-Stop floated, aloof and beautiful. Near the bottom of the image swam several broad sheets of solar cells. In the distance were the flecks of light that were fuel tanks and spent thundertrees. In time, they would be fastened to the framework, linked by tunnels, powered by the solar cells, and staffed with Racs eager to take the next step outward, away from First-Stop and toward reunion with the gods.

  Next a scientist was saluted for discovering a drug that would increase Rac fertility and hence the size of the population that struggled to pursue the destiny the Remakers had assigned the Racs. The next generation would learn more and faster, and there would be more farmers, miners, and factory workers to support the drive beyond the edge of space.

  Another was honored for learning that the larger dumbos, big-eared flying creatures with feathered wings and furry bodies, could tell each other where to find nectar and water bodies suitable for egg-laying. They uttered sounds pitched above the range Rac ears could hear and used the echoes to navigate. To communicate, they played back the echoes they had encountered on their way to their find.

  Finally it was time to leave. The High Priest scratched his face and bowed one last time, turned, descended the steps of his pyramid, and vanished. The crowd began to seep from the Hall to the pathways outside.

  “Well?” said Sunglow.

  “Well, what?”

  “A basket lunch? A beer or two? An afternoon picking berries on the Field?” She sounded less dejected than she had before the service had begun.

  “I have to…”

  “Work. I know. You work too much.”

  “I’m sorry. But…” He made the gesture that, for a Rac, was a shrug.

  “It’s not good for you.”

  As the Great Hall continued to empty, the crowd shifted. Space appeared between its members. Dotson Barbtail could no longer feel the pressure of others against his pelt. He let go of his money pouch and smiled as he noted Sunglow doing just the same. Together they turned toward the Hall’s high doors and moved with the gaps among their neighbors.

  “Dotson!”

  Moss and honeysuckle filled the eye with purple and green
, the nose with scent. Beyond the grounds and the valley’s encircling buildings, the bluffs lifted high to scattered trees and the walls of offices and hotels and private homes. But they were not given the chance to admire the view.

  “Dotson!”

  They turned as one to find an older Rac approaching from one side. The hairs of his pelt were tipped with silver-gray, giving him a frosted, grizzled appearance, and his whiskers were white. His claws rasped against his muzzle. “Senior Hightail,” said Dotson as both he and Sunglow returned the greeting gesture. “The head of my department,” he added for Sunglow’s benefit.

  “I haven’t seen many interim reports from you lately,” said the Senior. His tone was smooth and high enough to indicate a degree of anger. Behind him, another scholar from the Center pretended not to hear what he was saying. Dotson thought he recognized one of the astronomy section. Starsight? Was that his name?

  “Has there been any progress?” asked Senior Hightail when Dotson did not reply immediately.

  “Not as much as I would like,” admitted the younger Rac.

  “I know why.”

  Dotson hoped he did not look as surprised as he felt.

  “You haven’t been spending enough time in the lab. Not for months.”

  “I’ve been waiting for samples,” said Dotson. “But they’ve been having trouble with the submersibles, and…”

  The Senior snorted so hard that droplets sprayed from his nostrils. “More likely it’s this pretty thing.” He pointed at Sunglow. “Shouldn’t let yourself be distracted. Not if you wish to accomplish anything.”

  “Yessir.” What else could he say? That even though the submersibles were not visiting the deep-sea vents, he had all the samples he needed in the lab’s freezers? That he didn’t spend nearly as much time with Sunglow as she wished he would?

  “It’s important, you know. All Rackind is counting on you.”